Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Did you know that Facebook Connect – those pesky widgets imploring you to ‘join’ their websites – phones home every time you visit a webpage with the widget embedded? Worse, they have a history of leaking personally identifiable information to third parties.

Tired of the endless Facebook privacy debacles, a Google engineer has developed a Chrome extension that gets rid of Facebook Connect from all third party websites and with it terminates all communication between these widgets and Facebook servers.

The difference between the extension Facebook Disconnect and ad-blocking Facebook through your web browser or the operating system’s host file is that the former still allows people to use Facebook and leaves the ‘Like’ buttons intact. [via TechCrunch]